Customer Stories
AFRY improves design phase planning accuracy and schedule visualization with Hoylu
est. 1895 as Ångpanneförenigen (The Southern Swedish Steam Generator Association) Stockholm, Sweden
International engineering, design, and advisory company
Hoylu Value
Improved schedule visualization via use of swimlanes and dates
Increased plan accuracy via pull planning and dynamic re-planning
Facilitated closer, more intensive collaboration with owners in the design phase
AFRY AB is an international engineering, design, and advisory company headquartered in Stockholm, Sweden. Formed from a 2019 merger of ÅF and Pöyry, but with roots dating back to 1895, AFRY has offices in 40 countries and employs over 19,000 employees globally. Divided across three sectors; infrastructure, industry, and energy, AFRY’s mission is to accelerate the transition to a sustainable society through its five divisions: Infrastructure, Industrial and Digital Solutions, Process Industries, Energy, and Management Consulting.
Introduction
AFRY’s team in Oslo, Norway works closely with clients on a wide range of industrial projects. Recent projects within their Buildings department include engineering work for the construction of Norway’s tallest building, and the expansion of a factory hall for a manufacturer of subsea electric cables.
Challenge
These projects require extensive and detailed planning during the design phase. AFRY teams had previously utilized Spanwall, Nureva, Miro, and Excel, but found that none fully addressed their needs, including the ability to collaborate closely and intensively with the project’s owner in the design phase.
Excel fell short of the team’s needs when it came to intuitively visualizing their plans. “In the initial planning, it’s much better to see dependencies between the tasks, and you can see the consequence if you remove a note, that you can’t see in Excel. You can set the tasks complete or incomplete, and you can get nice graphics that show you how the status is for the project. Those kinds of qualities are not in Excel.”
Solution
After trialing multiple other solutions, AFRY began using Hoylu. The team immediately found it very easy to learn and implement.
“I meet a lot of people that think it’s scary to use new tools. But I think that it has been very easy to use. The swimlanes and the dates have made it easier for people to understand how it works, compared to other programs where you don’t have any swimlanes and dates to connect with,” explains Aleksander Svien, design manager at AFRY.
Results
In addition to its ease of onboarding and use, the AFRY team quickly saw value in being able to easily navigate between plans and maintain better visualization of their project schedules. “We often have three or four projects at the same time. And, for me as a design manager to keep an overview and to have control on my projects, I use and switch between the different plans, both for the team to have a better overview, but it’s also very important for me to have full control over all the trades,” says Svien.
The ability to easily pull plan and re-plan has also been essential in enabling more accurate planning. “When we do the backwards planning, we see that we need so much more time than we thought in advance. So, it’s been very useful to make realistic plans for our projects,” Svien explains.
The use of Hoylu has enabled closer and more intense collaboration with the project owner during the design phase, which reduces rework later in the project and increases the client’s satisfaction with the finished project. “When we get the owner involved in our planning, they see how important it is for us to get the right input at the right time so we can keep the progress going,” Svien adds.
Overall, the team is more confident in the accuracy of their design phase planning and their ability to maintain control of the schedule. “When we get those tasks up on the screen like this, it helps us to deliver each week, instead of when we don’t have a plan, everything seems to just float towards the end, and it’s chaos at the end of the project,” adds Svien.
About Hoylu
Our platform offers you and your team the power of unified planning with an intuitive solution that combines feature-rich whiteboarding, planning, and task management. Plan, engage, and visualize your projects with best-in-class usability and integrations. Bring your best ideas together with your best data across disparate teams and solutions for unified, unlimited, unbeatable construction project planning.